Hacker News Reader

Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

I really hope this comes back to bite them. I already find myself not watching as many videos simply because I can't gauge the like/dislike ratio on them. In the short term I expect an explosion in clickbait and low quality videos because people won't be able to immediately see that the video is bogus from dislike counts. I suspect people will tend to retreat into watching the channels they already like and cut down on consuming recommendations.

I'm already trying to gauge likes vs watch count as a sloppy proxy for video quality but it's just not the same.

View on HN

I find what you said really interesting, mainly because I don't think I've _ever_ used likes or dislikes (or their ratio) as a metric for choosing what to watch. The most I've interacted with dislikes is when seeing some helpful low-production-value video, or some artist's music stream, I've wondered why 1-3% of the viewers disliked it. I mean, even when I've found _better_ or _more informative_ videos, I've never been tempted to dislike the previous ones I'd watched that weren't as good.

This. I find that the vast majority of cases where I'd pay any attention to the dislike bar are just cases where people are getting dogpiled for whatever reason (whether they deserve it or not, or if anyone deserves to be treated like that on the internet, is another matter entirely) but I've heard reasonable arguments from people talking about tutorials and other informative videos that the like:dislike ratio is a convenient sniff test for if the video is worth watching.

Clickbait is bad enough without removing one of the last few tools left in the arsenal to fight it.

I feel like we have different definitions as to what clickbait is - when I see a clickbait video, I can simply identify it by it's title and thumbnail, I've never needed to look at the like:dislike ratio to confirm that it's clickbait. What kind of videos do you find as clickbait?

An interview where they spend 30 minutes off-subject and 1 minute on-subject. A tutorial with 10 minutes of detailed explanation and a "now draw the owl" step buried 3/4 of the way through. A thumbnail that promises a level of complexity, sophistication, or accomplishment that winds up never actually happening in the video.

Content farms aren't the only ones in the clickbait game these days.

I have a great example that illustrates my use of likes/dislikes as a filter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRCSX-u01eM

The video is titled: "Boeing C-17 Globemaster Jet Crash All Hell breaks loose". It has 2,302,640 views and I took a screenshot of the like/dislike metrics before the change took place. 1.6K Upvoted, 21K Downvoted.

The spoiler is that the plane taking off never actually crashes. It just looks like it will because of the camera angle. The uploader wrote "I made this video to start a conversation and it has certainly started a conversation ..." but has disabled comments. The video is a complete and total lie and the ratio reflected that. Without comments, you have nothing else to warn you about the video. From now on, you will have to rely on the fact that a video viewed two million times only has one and a half thousand likes as a proxy.

Granted, I know some videos are prone to have bad-looking ratios because they are discussing contentious topics. I give those a wide berth and don't immediately dismiss them because they have a 60-40 like dislike ratio.

I still see the up/down counts.

Dislikes indicate politics, clickbait, or unhelpfulness. Politics is obvious, but clickbait and unhelpfulness can waste a lot of your time before becoming obvious. Dislikes help combat this.

And let’s be honest, most political videos don’t have enough dislikes from both sides.

For entertainment it’s not that big of a deal but still annoying not to see the ratio to total counts, but for educational content or how to videos it is absolutely critical. Have you ever tried to search got to fix a washing machine or basically anything? Even with likes and dislikes you have to go through tons of videos that are just plain bad advice before you can figure it out. 90% of the time the dislikes help you weed out the straight up clickbait material and the other 10% it tells you when what the person did will actually make a problem worse.

Yeah it occurred to me that I glance down to see the likes and dislikes to see how credible some of the how-to videos I watch are. A lot of them are garbage or dangerous and that's reflected in the dislike count. Fortunately you can scrub through maybe the top 30 comments to see if there's anything off.

YouTube is such an awesome thing. The executives want to destroy it. The content creators and users are pissed off.

This whole dislike thing fundamentally breaks YT for me. Completely. I will not waste time watching videos if they’re not worth watching.

There is a reason why IMDB is a thing. If they remove ratings, it becomes useless. Ratings are the foundational aspect of IMDB.

Google needs a lesson or two and I hope the community responds in the strongest form of protest.

> There is a reason why IMDB is a thing. If they remove ratings, it becomes useless. Ratings are the foundational aspect of IMDB.

Are the ratings why people go to IMDB? I use IMDB as a database on the internet for movies and TV cast/crew credits. I almost never look at the ratings for the things I look up.

IMDB ratings are solid and often the main reason why people go to IMDB at all.

8: a masterpiece

7: enjoyable

6: watchable if you like that specific thing

5 and lower: oddball

There are some exceptions for niche movies (may have very low or very high rating) and for recently aired, otherwise it's pretty reliable.

I always thought crowd sourced ratings was one of the killer apps of the internet. That's what makes Airbnb possible, what made darknet markets successful, what makes Amazon powerful...

Throwing away ratings is like going into the woods to live and throwing away your book on native plant life. I guess just nibble at whatever looks good, even if it might be void of nutritional value or poisonous at worst.

It’s amazing that this needs to be spelled out for the HN community. I thought how can you ever oppose this - I am trying hard to listen to the counter arguments but it’s just not holding up. Something sinister is going on and we are secretly wishing for an authoritarian world - my cynical guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com